scala

Lightbend Podcast: Teaching Scala To Computer Science 101 Students

Teaching Scala In 2020

In this Lightbend podcast, I sit down with Dr. Mark Lewis, professor of computer science at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, to discuss the benefits he sees of teaching Scala to introductory computer science students.

Mark has taught computer science since 2001, and nowadays focuses on teaching Scala as well as some Big Data courses, and, every 4 years or so, Solar System Astronomy on the side. We discuss how he got into Scala and what it’s like to teach computer science to our university aged generation. Additionally, Mark shares with us his experiences on:

The path to Scala back in 2008.
What part of “getting it” with Scala was influential to his experience.
What his students say they love and hate most about learning Scala as a beginner.
The addition of Big Data materials to his curriculum, and the connection between Scala and tools like Akka, Spark, and Kafka.
An answer to the claim that learning Scala is hard.

Mark has a very popular YouTube Channel for his Scala courses, which has over 1.7 million total views! These represent the course material that he encourages his students to review prior to classes so that in-class time can focus on coding and questions. We recommend you check out some of his videos!